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Keeping a Journal

Professor Evan Radcliffe, English Department

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Because writing depends on a crucial way of thinking, in this course you'll be keeping a journal; by writing in it, you'll follow up various issues and questions. This writing will be different from the kind of writing you do in a formal essay; you won't be trying to write a document that's polished, neat, and final, but rather seeking to think about and explore something. So your entries may often be tentative or speculative, and you may end up going in directions that aren't closely connected to the limited topic at hand but that for some reason seem important or interesting to you. This kind of writing will give you a chance to think about things before class and will help you develop your ability to think and write about what we're reading.

 

You'll have a lot of journal assignments. I'll read your entries, and they'll be taken into account for your final grade. But since they'll be numerous and informal, in writing them you needn't feel the kind of pressure you may feel when writing formal papers or exams.

When you're responding to an assignment, do what it tells you to do, but don't be afraid to strike out in a different direction as well. Feel free to respond personally, to raise questions, to bring up a totally unrelated topic--for example, a second thought about a previous entry or about something we read a week before, a speculation about things in general, an observation about how a TV show raised an issue we'd discussed. Think of your journal as being a conversation with yourself, as well as with me and perhaps with your classmates.

Some Mechanics of Keeping a Journal

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Keep your entries in a folder with pockets or a ring binder. Don't use a spiral notebook, so that you can hand in individual pages, and don't use paper ripped from a spiral notebook, because your teacher hates it.

Start each entry on a new sheet of paper. Leave margins--I may write responses in the margins, and you may want to write down second thoughts there also. Write in whatever form makes you most comfortable; handwriting is fine (of course if you like to work at a computer, feel free to do so).

Put your name and the date at the top of each page (you might even want to put the time that you started writing--that's up to you).

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